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1. One of the great ironies of modern warfare is that high tech has made warfare both cost effective (cheaper), and more or less readily available to virtually any group with a mind to indulge in this sort of violence . Tech has substantially democratized warfare so that it is no longer possible for states to tightly control (as tightly as they were willing to control but theoretically quite tight) zones of combat. This does not just refer to cyber operations, but also to the technologies of low tech projections (gliders, tunnel work, and the like).
2. The democratization of combat engagement through access to key instruments of warfare means that states no longer wage war either. Anyone can project themselves into a a zone of combat and destabilize even the most carefully planned state based strategies. Elon Musk taught us that in Ukraine; Hamas provides an excellent example of a hybrid entity.
3. Matrix strategies appear to work well when deployed against traditional state based defensive/offensive conventional military structures. The Ukrainians have sought to profit form this as well--but they are more tightly controlled by their arms suppliers and the others who have the ability to insert themselves in combat operations.
4. Even cheaper than access to cyber and lo tech instruments, are the equipment needed to engage in probably the most important "home fronts" of combat--the control of narratives through text and now especially images. The ability of democratic societies to wage war is as much a function of the curation of mass opinion as it is the production and deployment of troops, or combat related material. Destabilizing the home fronts by mobilization of sympathizers (made much easier now through the more fluid patterns of migration that permit--to a certain extent the insertion of necessary personnel). But even in the absence of strategic migration uses (a longer term strategy) is the mobilization of the young, and the control of the risk calculus of press organs. Narrative control is a cottage industry and may be undertaken by those less useful in combat operations. Tech makes it possible to leverage these strategic "story construction" strategies through automated and generative mechanisms.
5. Modern hybrid warfare tends to use the strength of the opponent against it. The basic strategy was nicely described in the movie War War Z (2013)--where the virus was unstoppable, until it was discovered that it tended to ignore people with advanced terminal diseases. What made it strong also turned out to be the weakness the exploitation of which could be exploited to defeat it.
6. Non-state multi-vector hybrid tactics must be understood as a limited purpose vehicle. It is meant to startle, weaken morale, cause terror among the object population, and frighten allies and enemies abroad. But they are hardly enough to sustain action (on generational combat fronts) to secure ultimate objectives (in the case of Hamas the compete eradication of the State of Israel and the disposition of its (to use their euphemism) "settler" populations (Jewish people, and perhaps Circassians, Samaritans, Bahai people, and Druze). Its most profound purpose was to put an opponent in an impossible situation--in the way that the destruction of the Twin Rowers in New York were meant to do as well.
7. The impossible situation revolves around the following principle elements (though there are always other contextually relevant factors): (1) to provoke disproportionate or misplaced responses(either physical or on the narrative, propaganda, or other fronts); (2) to weaken or destroy the narratives of invincibility or superiority of the opponent (also creating an almost irresistible reflex on the part of the opponent to disprove); (3) to case terror in the populations of the opponent usually in some intimate and gruesome way; (4) to develop narrative strategies of victim blaming--as a means of bootstrapping political objectives to the modalities of hybrid operations built around terror; (5) to provide rallying events for allies elsewhere (the semiotic projection of terror and hybrid operations into the mass manipulation/curation democratic front--the "day of rage" was a useful example of the type); and (6) to disrupt opponent operations abroad. One of the most potent lessons here is the way that this attack has served as all the cover necessary to re-introduce classical ethno-religious hatred through narrative conflations of states, religions ethnicities in a way that blends classical racism, xenophobia, anti-migrant bias all directed against a singular group (eg here).
8. State targets, of course, will have to develop better responsive strategies. The strategic countermeasures are the easiest to work through. Much much harder are the development of strategies that permit a state to avoid falling into the trap of emotive and intemperate response (while at the same time preserving target state social coherence by producing a response). Barbarous responses by the target state creates a null set and reduces the target to the level of the (much weaker) opponent, now made "stringer" by the dissipation of the moral force of the target. At the same time, less formal countermeasures, cy-ops and psych-ops will have to be perfected and better delivered through means of tech infrastructures. Measures will also have to be developed in the longer term to destabilize the internal narratives that support the social relations and cohesion of the group and that of their allies abroad. There is more of course, but what is clear is that no state can avoid working through the consequences of this shift in the power to wage war. Ultimately, the enemy, however constituted, will require nullification--not the population (which requires management, but those elements which make that impossible. All of this, in whichever direction it manages to flow, must adhere to and take advantage of discursive trope and rhetorical expectations (in text, image and performance) that facilitates the legitimacy of even the more robust counter-measure. Not a pretty picture to be sure; and to some extent abhorrent to those who had hoped, almost eighty years after the end of WWII, for the triumph of a world order in which combat actions would be slowly eliminated.
Hamas' Attack on Israel: A Lesson in Contemporary Hybrid Warfare
The deadly weekend attacks by Hamas against mainly young people at a musical festival in Israel reveals a new and challenging shift in how terrorist organisations are approaching their political goals. Hybrid forms of warfare are not new, but their characteristics are likely to trouble state responses.
This past Saturday Australians awoke to the news that the Palestinian terror group Hamas had launched thousands of rockets on Israel, along with the invasion of over a thousand terrorists to murder as many (Jewish) Israeli civilians as possible and to take multiple hostages for the purpose of hostage diplomacy.
This attack by Hamas on the fifty-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 seems to have caught Israel’s military and security services by surprise, as it was the case back in 1973.
Some political and military commentators have already compared the events of 7 October 2023 with the US 11 September attacks, implying that the same potential for future conflict with similarly seismic changes to the Middle East is in tow. One day later, Israel’s government confirmed the total number of Israeli victims at 700 murdered and 100 abducted. The number of murder victims alone makes this massacre of Jewish Israelis the worst since the Nazi Holocaust of over 75 years ago. As a consequence, Israel declared a state of war and called up 300,000 reserves.
Hamas’ surprise attacks developed along various modes and intertwined vectors of warfare (land, air, and sea) and incorporated both overt and covert methods. They seem to have been planned well in advance and their coordination and execution was well practiced. According the Washington, Iran has been complicit but not involved directly in these attacks.
Australian retired general and military analyst Mick Ryan credits Hamas’ military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, with having been able to plan, integrate, and execute military operations across multiple domains – a simultaneity of operations mostly associated with the capabilities of an advanced state actor’s military.
These attacks were multi modal and combined elements of conventional (rocket barrage) and unconventional warfare (insurgency operators and paragliders) to achieve its main objective of spreading fear and terror through the employment of ISIS-styled acts of barbarity:
They shot people in cars & at bus stops, they rounded up women & children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen and machine-gunned them. They went house to house to find & murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza.
This deliberate murder of mostly Jewish Israelis by Hamas death squads and the taking of hostages inserted a new and even more perfidious dimension to previous attacks by Hamas on Israel in 2008/9, 2012 and 2014. Then the main “modus operandi” was the indiscriminate shelling of Israeli towns, kibbutzim, and cities from Gaza by Hamas leading to defensive and retaliatory action by Israel, which took place mainly in the air domain with only limited land operations (for example Operation Cast Lead of 2008/9).
The two new dimensions of terrorism in the form of mass murder and hostage taking, in addition to the conventional rocket attacks, highlights the use of cognitive warfare – to influence public support for “for Hamas and Palestinians, and also reignite hatred for Israel. Early signs that this part of Hamas’ plan is going well [include] “victory” celebrations… in countries in the Middle East and even in Berlin and New York, with pro-Palestinian groups cheering Hamas’ killings and other atrocities.”
This development in the narrative space plays out well for Hamas as it aims to disrupt the current Israeli peace process with the Arab world, namely the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, “that was being brought about by a growing realisation of the common danger from Iran and its terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.” Such a rapprochement would have had a significant impact on the continuation of both political and economic support for the Palestinian cause. Any robust Israeli military response, including the expected land operations and occupation of Gaza, will have a significant impact on such Israeli peace initiatives, including the Abraham accords with a number of Arab states.
Besides the political signal of being able to attack Israel on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, the current operations by Hamas highlight the emergence of Hybrid Warfare as a concept of modern conflict. Such concepts were discussed as early as 2005 by the US military and then developed further by NATO in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression by proxy in the Donbas of 2014. Analysing lessons learned from Israel’s costly war with Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon war, US military analyst Frank Hoffman defined Hezbollah’s approach to warfighting as “Hybrid threats/warfare” which “incorporate a full range of different modes of warfare including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder. Hybrid Wars can be conducted by both states and a variety of nonstate actors [with or without state sponsorship].”
It seems as if Hamas has shown its ability to learn from Hezbollah’s approach to fighting Israel in 2006. Military analysts regarded the outcome of the 2006 war as a defeat for Israel’s defence forces.
Whether Hamas will be able to emulate Hezbollah’s “success” with its attack on Israel remains to be seen. What is a more likely outcome is that the brutality and the sheer barbarity of Hamas’ attack will lead to its overall demise: Israel’s “9/11” could very well turn into Hamas’ very own Waterloo.
Sascha-Dominik (Dov) Bachmann is Professor in Law and Co-Convener National Security Hub (University of Canberra), University of Canberra, and a Research Fellow with the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa, Faculty of Military Science, Stellenbosch University.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
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